Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems 23 (2019) 158–166 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems jou rn al hom epage: www.elsevier.com/locate/suscom Reauthentication scheme for mobile wireless sensor networks Vandana Mohindru a,∗ , Ravindara Bhatt b , Yashwant Singh c a Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chandigarh Group of Colleges – College of Engineering, Landran, Mohali, India b Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Jaypee University of Information Technology, Waknaghat, Solan, H.P., India c Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Central University of Jammu, Jammu & Kashmir, India a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 8 October 2018 Received in revised form 4 June 2019 Accepted 29 July 2019 Available online 13 August 2019 Keywords: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) Mobile node Reauthentication Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs) Voronoi regions Mobile Healthcare Security a b s t r a c t Wireless sensor networks consist of static as well as mobile sensor nodes. Due to deployment of the sensor nodes, generally in an unattended and hostile environment, it becomes a critical issue as well as a cumbersome task to safeguard these nodes against various kinds of security attacks. The mobility of sensor nodes is a significant issue because these nodes continuously move from one region to another region and reconnect to other sensor nodes. Reauthentication and locating the node movement are the primary security issues in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs). Many previous security algorithms available in the literature only consider the issues of static sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient mobile node authentication algorithm. For mobile node authentication, we design the reauthentication approach for mobile nodes and also design an authentication framework for securing MWSNs. The proposed protocol is compared with existing mobile node authentication protocols available in the literature. We observe that the proposed protocol provides low overhead while achieving the security requirements for mobile wireless sensor networks. © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs) consists of spatially distributed static sensor nodes [1,2] and a fraction of mobile sen- sor nodes in the Region-of-Interest (RoI). The applications of the MWSNs can be widely divided into time-driven, event-driven, on- demand and tracking based applications. The fraction of mobile nodes is advantageous over a complete static wireless sensor net- work in terms of several Quality-of-Service parameters such as energy efficiency, coverage, connectivity etc. [3]. Further, security [4] is an important issue in MWSN due to the dynamic nature of the mobile nodes [5,6]. Node mobility is the main concern in several application scenarios such as the Intelligent Transportation Sys- tem and healthcare scenario. In Mobile Healthcare (m-healthcare) applications nodes move from one region to another during the lifetime of a mobile node [7]. Therefore, the topology in a wireless sensor network based health scenario changes due to the mobility of nodes. This, in turn, leads to an increase in data management, topology management, and security issues in healthcare applica- tions [8]. ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail address: vandanamohindru@gmail.com (V. Mohindru). Therefore, our motivation is to present an energy-efficient, low overhead reauthentication scheme approach [9,10]. Reauthentica- tion of the mobile sensor nodes is required as these nodes are constrained to change their regions with the passage of time. In this paper, we present the Reauthentication approach for mobile nodes in the network. In this work, we design an authentication frame- work for securing MWSN [11]. The proposed protocol is compared with existing mobile node authentication protocols available in the literature [12,13]. We observe that the proposed protocol provides low overhead while achieving the security requirements for mobile wireless sensor networks. The contribution towards our work can be summarized as follows: Our reauthentication scheme is based on the schemes of Jiang et al. [14] and Kim et al. [15]. In order to reduce the communication overhead of the mobile nodes, our scheme is similar to Jiang et al. [14]. Our scheme is based on the hierarchical architecture in which we divide the regions into Voronoi regions [16]. The centre of the region in each of the Voronoi region is given by Voronoi Cluster Heads (VCH). The proposed scheme works for non-neighbour clus- ter heads (CH) and neighbours cluster heads. Compared to the work of Kim et al. [15] our scheme does not depend on the base station for routing of packets for non-neighbor cluster heads. The routing of packets for non-neighbor cluster heads is done on-demand basis by the VCH [16]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.suscom.2019.07.010 2210-5379/© 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.